Friday, 27 July 2012

The Passing of the Passenger Pigeon

The extinction of any species,
either by accident or design, is never a Good Thing (except, maybe, Smallpox, but
technically that isn’t extinct anyway), but the reasons for some extinctions
just boggle the mind. Take the current threat to tigers, rhinos and sea-horses
for instance, species in danger of extinction because they are being poached
for the ingredients of traditional oriental ‘medicine’ – no more than hokum
practiced by quacks on the gullible. Indefensible. But of all the sorry stories
in the whole sorry history of man’s extirpation of other species, the very
sorriest has to be that of the Passenger Pigeon.

The Passenger Pigeon

Imagine, if you can, the
immense size of the population of Passenger Pigeon. One estimate puts it at
between three and five billion individuals.

Hunting the Flocks of Passenger Pigeons

Now a billion is currently held to
be a thousand million, (although I was taught that a billion was a million
million, but that’s by the bye). Taking the short form, the thousand million
version, a billion 1,000,000,000 - or 10 to the power 9 – that is 109. A billion
seconds is just short of 32 years, so the average Western lifespan in between
two and three billion seconds. A billion minutes is just short of two thousand
years - that means a billion minutes ago, Christianity was a new religion. A
billion hours ago, mankind was living in the Stone Age. A billion days ago,
mankind’s early ancestors were wandering the African savannah, and mankind
didn’t yet exist. A billion months ago, the dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous
period ruled the earth. A billion years ago, the very earliest multicellular
eukaryotes were beginning to emerge from (in the mandatory phrase to be used in
explanations of this kind) the primeval slime. And 13.7 billion years ago, the
universe began. A billion is a big number. Really big.

Passenger Pigeon

Between three and five
billion Passenger Pigeons was a lot of Passenger pigeons. Flocks of them a mile
wide and three hundred miles long were said to take fourteen hours to fly past
an observer. Audobon says that as they flew by, the sun was blotted out. They
were, simply, innumerable. With the possible exception of the swarms of
locusts, they were most populous creatures in North America.

Passenger Pigeon on its nest

So what harm, you
might say, in using them as a food source? There are so many of them, a few
thousand – hell, even a few million – wouldn’t even scratch the surface of
something so plentiful. Plentiful – these things are inexhaustible! Take as
many as you want. Have you seen the size of the flocks – they’re like the stars
in the night sky? So, take them they did, for food and for feathers.

$1 a dozen

A dozen
birds for a dollar was dear, a dozen for twenty-five cents was more like it.
Passenger Pigeons were cheap food for slaves; they were so ubiquitous people
got sick of eating them.

Pigeon Net

“Unlimited netting, even during the entire nesting
season, has resulted in sending over one million pigeons to market from a
single roost in one year, leaving perhaps as many more wounded birds and
starving, helpless, naked squabs behind, until the poultry stalls became so
glutted with pigeons that the low price per barrel scarcely paid for their
transportation, and they were fed to the hogs.”

Neltje Blanchan Birds
That Hunt and Are Hunted 1904.

Report on the shipments of Passenger Pigeons

At one time 50,000 birds a day, for a period
of five months, were shipped by boxcar to New York. “In 1848 Massachusetts
gravely passed a law protecting the netters of wild pigeons from foreign
interference! There was a fine of $10 for damaging nets, or frightening pigeons
away from them” (Hornaday, p.13).

Advert for Pigeon Shooting Match

‘Sporting’ competitions were staged, the winner was the one who shot the
most birds with the least shots; birds were even caught and released before the
guns to provide sufficient targets.

Advert for Pigeon Trap

But there was something about Passenger
Pigeons that people didn’t understand. Passenger Pigeons were essentially
gregarious. The reason they gathered in flocks was a defence mechanism – if a
few members of the flock were lost to predators, the whole flock survived. A
wheeling flock would confuse the predator, and the weakest would be weeded out,
whilst the fittest survived.

Passenger Pigeons

And the flocks were necessary for the social
conditions needed for the birds to breed. But as the flocks diminished, this
balance was disturbed. By disrupting the pattern of successive generations, and
by upsetting the optimum conditions for survival, the population went into decline.
It was unable to sustain itself. A few perceptive individuals saw this
disruption and warning bells were sounded, although, in the beginning, these
went unheeded. When the early conservationists tried to get legislation passed
to control the harvesting of the pigeons, they were given short shrift.

Frontispiece - Our Vanishing Wild Life W T Hornaday 1913

“The passenger pigeon needs no
protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its
breeding grounds, travelling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here
to-day and elsewhere to-morrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or
be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced”

Report of a Select
Committee of the Senate of Ohio 1857

For goodness sake, that ‘ no ordinary
destruction’. This was no ordinary destruction. It was
extraordinary. But the powers that be weren’t convinced. They knew best, as
they continue to do, and so the slaughter continued. The ornithological experts
were dismissed as mere what-do-they-know ‘experts’ or cranks. And trade was trade. There
was money to be made. (Does this sound faintly familiar? It damn well should).

“As
soon as it is ascertained in a town that the pigeons are flying numerously in
the neighbourhood, the gunners rise en masse; the clap-nets are spread out on
suitable situations, commonly on an open height in an old buckwheat field, four
or five live pigeons, with their eyelids sewed up are fastened on a
movable stick, a small hut of branches is fitted up for the fowler at the
distance of forty or fifty yards. By the pulling of a string, the stick on
which the pigeons rest is alternately elevated and depressed, which produces a
flittering of their wings, similar to that of birds alighting. This being
perceived by the passing flocks, they descend with great rapidity, and finding
corn, buck-wheat, etc, strewed about, begin to feed, and are instantly, by the
pulling of a cord, covered by the net. In this manner ten, twenty, and even
thirty dozen have been caught at one sweep.”

Our Vanishing Wildlife W T
Hornaday 1913

The evidence continued to accrue, but when the penny finally
dropped, it was far too late. The expected annual flocks failed to appear. In
1878, a flock of about fifty million birds began nesting in Wisconsin, but
hunters moved in and the flock was scattered. The shattered population continued
to be reported as individual specimens, but there was no return to the great
gatherings of the past.

Sportsmen?

Rewards were offered in return for locating nesting
pigeons, but these were birds that were gregarious roosters, and wouldn’t build
an individual nest, as that was against their innate instincts. In addition,
the strength-in-numbers survival strategy of the flocks was lost, and lone
birds became easy prey for predators. The population fell like a house of
cards, and nothing could stop the collapse. Birds continued to be seen, as they
had a life span of about twenty years, but new birds were not being hatched to
replace the older generations. Sightings became rarer and rarer, and eventually
stopped altogether.

Heroic Hunters (... and is that chap on the extreme left on his mobile?)

“The last wild specimen (so we believe) that ever will
reach the hands of man, was taken near Detroit, Michigan, on Sept. 14, 1908”
(Hornaday, p.14), although sightings were reported until the 1930s, which were
probably mistakenly identified Mourning Doves, a closely related species.

Passenger Pigeon

There
were some captive birds still alive, but these all eventually died of old age.
In 1908, there were just two males and a female, Martha, remaining, in
Cincinnati Zoo. One of the males died in 1909, the other the following year.